Uighur Scholar’s Life Sentence Is Seen as Reining in Debate on Minorities in China

BEIJING — The news that a Uighur academic, Ilham Tohti, had been sentenced in China to life in prison on charges of separatism drew a torrent of international outrage this week. President Obama called for his release, the European Union condemned the sentence as “totally unjustified,” and rights advocates said they could not recall a similarly harsh penalty for a prominent intellectual whose main offense, it appeared, was criticizing government policies.

By contrast, Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese scholar and Nobel laureate who agitated for an end to single-party rule, is serving 11 years for subversion.

Many analysts said the severe sentence, handed down on Tuesday, fit in with Beijing’s increasingly heavy-handed treatment of China’s ethnic minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang, where resistance to rule by the Han majority shows no signs of abating. A slow-boil Uighur insurgency in Xinjiang, the resource-rich expanse of northwest China, has claimed hundreds of lives in a wave of violence over the past year.

Although no evidence was presented to show that Mr. Tohti, an economics professor, had championed violence or advocated independence for China’s Uighurs, prosecutors said that his public efforts to discuss mounting inequality and repression in the region were cynical ploys meant to split the nation.

By broaching those issues in his classroom, talking to foreign journalists and running an online forum for Uighur issues, prosecutors said, Mr. Tohti had “bewitched” his students, “maliciously hyped Xinjiang-related issues” and “exploited foreign forces to create pressure to make Xinjiang an international matter,” according to court documents posted online by his lawyer, Li Fangping.

Mr. Li said in an interview on Wednesday that Mr. Tohti was stunned by the life sentence, which included the confiscation of his assets, a punishment directed at his wife and young children. “None of us could believe it,” Mr. Li said, adding that he assumed the sentence had been decided by the party leadership before the two-day trial began last week.

Mr. Li said Mr. Tohti planned to appeal the verdict, even though hopes for a reversal were slim.

The Communist Party’s aversion to outside criticism is well known, and Chinese leaders have long had zero tolerance for any challenge to their handling of minority affairs. Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, said party officials believed that any airing of minority grievances could encourage strife.

“The fact that Ilham Tohti survived so long makes him an outlier,” Mr. Bequelin said. “The truth is, there is a well-enforced prohibition against Uighurs and Tibetans criticizing minority policies, and reality finally caught up with him.”

Given Mr. Tohti’s international stature and his reputation as a measured voice calling for the autonomy promised in China’s constitution, many rights advocates said his conviction and sentencing showed that President Xi Jinping had embraced an uncompromising approach to Xinjiang.

Although violence has been mounting there since 2009, when ethnic rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, claimed about 200 lives, the latest policy shift was driven largely by two attacks in the past year. In October, a car carrying three Uighurs plowed into pedestrians in the heart of Beijing, killing five people, including the three occupants of the car, and injuring 38 others. Then, just after Mr. Xi visited the region in April, a bomb detonated at a train station in Urumqi. Mr. Xi responded with a vow to “spread nets from the earth to the sky” to end separatism.

For the central government, that means ramping up the use of Mandarin in Xinjiang’s schools and sending more Uighur college students to study in the predominantly Han East. Some recent measures take a more intrusive approach to assimilation. Earlier this month, a county in southern Xinjiang said it would encourage Han-Uighur intermarriage by showering ethnically mixed couples with cash payments and generous government benefits. A few days later in Hotan, a Silk Road city that is 95 percent Uighur and the scene of growing violence against Han migrants, the state media showcased a new “harmonious village” where the two ethnicities would live side by side.

Gardner Bovingdon, a professor at Indiana University who studies the region, said attempts at social engineering would probably exacerbate discontent among Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and are culturally more Central Asian than East Asian.

“Forcing Uighurs to assimilate with the Han while flooding the streets with armed troops is not the way to ease the mounting anger and estrangement,” said Professor Bovingdon, who, like a number of Western experts on Xinjiang, has been unable to obtain a Chinese visa in recent years.

Mr. Tohti, 44, who grew up in Xinjiang but lived most of his adult life in Beijing, frequently made the same argument. Fluent in Mandarin and well versed in the Chinese art of presenting critiques as well-meaning advice, he was a rare scholar in China who dared to point out the flaws in official policies.

By publishing figures on Uighur unemployment, for example, Mr. Tohti hoped to show the central government that its prodigious investments in the region were flowing mainly to newly arrived Han, creating a dangerous wealth gap.

He also questioned the official narrative that portrays any aspiration for Uighur autonomy as treason, and every act of violence as the work of Islamic jihadists. Restrictions on religious practice, Mr. Tohti gently warned, could inadvertently drive more Uighurs into the arms of conservative Islam.

Wang Lixiong, one of the few Han scholars to speak openly about the nation’s ethnic policies, said in an interview that silencing a moderate like Mr. Tohti would prove counterproductive.

“Ilham had an extensive network among Uighurs and Han Chinese,” he said. “Now that he’s gone, it will give radicals an example to show to their people that whoever is a moderate and still harbors illusions of improving ethnic ties should look at Ilham’s case for proof that it’s a dead end.”

In the end, critics say, Mr. Tohti was punished for pulling back the curtain on government policies that have failed to achieve their stated goal of promoting ethnic harmony. In an interview shortly before his detention in January, he expressed hope that Uighur and Han people might live together in Xinjiang, but said that without any public discussion about the causes of growing strife in the region, Beijing’s hopes for reconciliation were unrealistic.

“If there is no open discussion of the problems in Xinjiang, how can there be common understanding?” Mr. Tohti asked. “Sometimes I feel like the government is more afraid of people telling the truth than they are of the protests and violence.”

Patrick Zuo contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Uighur Scholar’s Life Sentence Is Seen as China’s Effort to Stifle Debate on Minorities. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe